As many of you know there was an issue with PBI’s causing them to freeze at random times during use. Kris went into full-blown hermit programmer mode to track down the issue and you’ll be glad to know a fix was committed that addresses this issue. Kris said of the fix: “it’s faster, cleaner, and allows proper access to all of the filesystem data. It can even be used by FreeBSD users who want to run different sets of packages in a location other than /usr/local”. To test out the new changes you will want to rebuild the pbi-manager backend. For those of you that may not know the pbi-manager utility is a backend that you never see, but is always there managing system interactions when running PBI’s. Follow the instructions below to grab the pc-bsd source and rebuild the pbi-manager to apply the fix.

1. Open a new terminal and paste: git clone https://github.com/pcbsd/pcbsd.git
This will create a directory for the PC-BSD source code

2. type: cd pcbsd/src-sh/pbi-manager/
This will browse directly to the pbi-manager source directory

3. type: sudo make install

4. Restart your system

And you’ve done it! Don’t forget to reset your system! PBI’s will not work until the system is reset. For more information, questions, or thoughts please post below.

Changes to Life Preserver

Life preserver has been updated to bring in some exciting new changes. New automatic snapshot schedules have been added along with new replication schedule options that will allow users more flexibility and control over their Life Preserver snapshot schedules (i.e. Hourly, 30 minutes, 10 minutes). New code has been added to allow the user to change the pop-up notification policy (all, only errors, none). A minor bug was also fixed that was causing non-error messages in the “Message” dialog.

Unifying PC-BSD Utility Chain

Work is continuing on standardizing the PC-BSD utility chain. More information has been added @ (http://wiki.pcbsd.org/index.php/Become_a_Developer/10.1). The changes will also bring in some new keyboard accessibility through hot keys and shortcut keys. There are currently several opportunities available to help update the tool chain, so if you’d like to lend a hand please let us know!

* Fix backend detection of LDAP/Active Directory users (still needs verification/testing by people with this special type of setup)
* Add option to show an auto-login delay (in which time the user can cancel the auto-login if necessary)
* Add option to disable showing the system users and require that the username also have to be typed in.

Login Manager Configuration Utility (pc-dmconf)
* Update to reflect the new PCDM configuration options
* Fix a bug where a blank auto-login username could be set

Today i’m pleased to announce we have quite a number of exciting changes coming that we would like to let everyone know about. Starting today I will putting together a weekly status update every Friday to help keep all of you up to date on what is new in PC-BSD land. This weekly digest will be a quick highlight of what important features have been added, what major bugs have been fixed, and what is presently going on in general with the project.

We are also shifting gears on how we find and report bugs to the developers. To better facilitate the resolution of trouble tickets in PC-BSD we have consolidated the bug forums into one general bug reporting forum. We are asking PC-BSD users to use the trac system for reporting bugs (trac.pcbsd.org), and use the bug reporting forums if for some reason you don’t have access to trac or you aren’t sure if something is a bug.

Best Regards,

Josh

Heres the highlights for this week, October the 11th 2013:

Early images of PC-BSD 10.0 are in development and are currently being rolled and are in early testing.

The new PC-BSD Disk Manager utility has been finished and committed to git. Special thanks to author and developer Claudio for this awesome new utility!

Life Preserver utility has been updated with new features and stability improvements

Bug reporting forums have been consolidated

Weekly PC-BSD Feature Digest

We have resolved a bug preventing users from upgrading properly via the update utility GUI.

A new PC-BSD forum has been created: pkgng Discussion. If you have problems installing software using pkgng or running an application installed using pkgng, post the details there so that the developers can fix the issue.

Earlier today, Karl Fischer mentioned that Tapatalk might be a useful forum feature. As described on its website, Tapatalk “is a forum app on the iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, and Nokia. Our app provides you super fast forum access to any vBulletin, IPBoard, phpBB or SMF forum that has activated our Tapatalk plugin”.

The forum system administrator added the plugin and has tested that it works for the iPhone and Karl is able to access the forums from Android. Please leave a comment if you have trouble accessing the PC-BSD forums from your phone and we’ll look into it. Otherwise, enjoy!